With the success of the “Disney On Ice” franchise, Disney has turned figure skating into a true cash cow and, in their stride to sell everything “Princess,” Disney offers two “royal skating extravaganzas,” one entitled “Princess Classics” and the other entitled “Princess Wishes.”

But the gender norms and racial stereotypes represented in Disney’s popular Princess Ice Shows are extremely troubling case studies in “Princess Propaganda.” In terms of their movement towards more highly traditional gender roles as well as the exoticization of non-white cultures, Disney has profited immensely from its relationship with the figure skating world.

If you ever had any doubt about the Princesses’ ultimate goal in life, the finale of “Princess Wishes” clears it right up. Set to the music of Cinderella’s “So this is Love,” this scene portrays the Princesses waltzing (on ice, that is) with their beloved Princes, all the while dressed in their wedding gowns. Even after scenes in the movie (and their depictions in the ice show) in which many of these Princesses defy patriarchal traditions — Belle’s struggles to read, Ariel’s breaking away from her father’s control, and Mulan’s enlistment in the Chinese army, for instance – these very same Princesses represent the patriarchal norm for women to move directly from their father’s home to their husband’s home. “One of the most spectacular moments is when the princes swing down in a daring move to rescue their damsels in distress,” says a news anchor from the Austin, TX CBS affiliate, reporting on the “Princess Classics” show touring their city.

That is, the Princesses rebel against their fathers only to join their husbands in this wedding waltz. They remain, in their white dresses, safely under patriarchal control.

In addition to this “Wedding Dress” scene, the finale for “Princess Classics” has all of the Princesses and their Princes dancing to Disney’s original song “If You Can Dream.” But what stands out the most in this scene (in addition to the fact that, in the end, some intense fireworks start streaming out from the bottom of Cinderella’s carriage, that is) is not just that Mulan is the only non-white Princess represented — since Pocahontas is not featured in either of the Princess “Disney on Ice” productions. Mulan is also wearing the traditional Chinese clothing, makeup, and hairstyle that she only wears during the scenes when she is in her father’s house or when she is preparing to meet the matchmaker. This outfit shows that she is available for marriage, and represents the oppression she actively rebels against in the movie by cutting her hair, wearing men’s clothing, and becoming a soldier. The clothing of the other Princesses is not as politically charged with gender issues, and this sets Mulan apart as the even more exotic ‘other.’

What also bothers me is that, during the Wedding Dress scene, Mulan is shown wearing a wedding dress along with the other Princesses. At the end of Mulan, not only does Mulan not get married, she’s not even in a relationship with her love interest Shang, who is notably not a prince. Mulan goes home as a great war-hero for China unaccompanied by a man, and Shang is left to follow her if he wants to be with her, placing him in the stereotype of the traditional feminine and her in the traditional masculine.

In both “Princess Wishes” and “Princess Classics,” then, the Princesses are not only held up as symbolic archetypes for the patriarchy, but Mulan’s story in particular is made more ‘exotic’ in her clothing choice as well as manipulated to a greater extent in order to make her fit with more traditional gender norms.

Because these Princesses’ stories as well as their depictions by “Disney on Ice” emphasize finding true love, getting married, and living ‘happily ever after,’ we have to question the ramifications of their influence on the young girls who consume Disney’s Princess products.

In a study conducted in 2005 by Susan Darker-Smith for the University of Derby, England called “The Tales We Tell Our Children – or over conditioning of girls to expect partners to change,” researchers found that “female victims of domestic violence often identified with passive, female role models they had encountered in fairy tales as children and believed that if their love was strong enough they could change their partner’s behavior… Interviewees made statements like: “I know I could change him back into the prince I fell in love with if only I could love him enough.”

The combination of these transformational themes as represented in Disney movies, such as Beauty and the Beast, as well as the way “Disney on Ice” manipulates the stories of their only strong, independent Princesses leaves young girls with fewer options for their future relationships.

This article features a video of women trying on the gowns as well as talking about their reasons for choosing a Disney dress over all of the other options. As one woman put it, “It’s so new. That’s one of the draws… No one else has it.” (Solutions Bridal is the only retailer in Florida to have the gowns at this time, so this weekend “brides from as far away as Seattle are flying to Central Florida to snap up the wedding dresses.”)

While many women may be drawn to the Disney collection right now simply because of its exclusivity, the issues behind these dresses and the consumerism inherent in the “Princess paradigm” also remain largely the same.

The woman who decides to buy the Jasmine-inspired gown in the video says that “It’s the closest thing I’ll ever become to Princess Jasmine, that’s for sure.”

Another woman from the video, “who purchased a gold dress inspired by Belle from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast,” says that “I just always thought as a little girl, [Disney's] where I wanted to get married…It’s kind of like the whole fairy-tale princess, happily-ever-after thing.”

For more information, check out this article from the Orlando Sentinel.

What Disney conveniently forgets to note here is that you not only supply the dream, but you also hand over your credit card at the same time.

Discussion centered on the Disney Princess phenomenon and its grasp on young girls around the world has dramatically increased recently, as epitomized by Peggy Orenstein’s New York Times article, “What’s Wrong with Cinderella?” This discourse generally focuses on the impact that the Princess paradigm might play in these girls’ futures as well as the possible reasons why the Princess brand sells in the first place. It has done nothing, however, to quell the power of “Princess” products, nor has it done anything to make Disney think harder about the terms and conditions it places within its “Princess” repertoire. (We can see examples of this in the mission statement above, taken directly from the brochure for the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique located in the new “Princess” room in the ‘World of Disney’ store at Downtown Disney, Orlando).

“Princess” means much more than royalty in Disney’s “Pirate and Princess” marketing campaign. It connotes simplified gender stereotypes and norms that in reality are much more complex and less rigid. This post aims not to recap other people’s arguments about the impact of the Disney Princesses, but to add to the discussion by analyzing one specific aspect of Disney’s “Princess” products — the full “Princess Experience” Disney offers to families and their young daughters while they are on vacation in Orlando.

In other words, when a little “Princess” comes to visit Cinderella’s Castle, she expects to live a more impossible fantasy than she can at home. By offering girls services such as the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique and My Disney Girl’s Perfectly Princess Tea Party, Disney involves girls in the creation of their own Princess dreams—for a steep price, of course.

The Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique and My Disney Girl’s Perfectly Princess Tea Party are extreme Princess experiences for girls ages 3 and up, designed to physically transform a young girl into a Princess and immerse her in a full-out Princess fantasy world.

At the Bibbidi Bobbibi Boutique, Disney takes dress-up to a new level, giving each girl her own station in the salon and her very own “Fairy Godmother-in-training” whose job is to pamper her with every accessory and service a Princess could possibly want. Parents can choose from three packages at the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique: the “Coach Package” which includes a hair style and shimmering make-up (for $35), the “Crown Package” which includes hair style, shimmering make-up and nails (for $45), or the ultimate “Castle Package” which includes the Crown Package plus a Princess photo shoot and a complete Disney Princess costume of her choice with accessories (starting at $175). After her makeover, each girl is given a pink sash that says “Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique” — so everyone who sees her knows that she’s an official Disney Princess.

My Disney Girl’s Perfectly Princess Tea Party is designed for girls who may have already been physically transformed into Princesses, either with an experience such as the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique or simply by putting on “their favorite Princess attire,” but who are still seeking a Princess experience where they can receive even more “royal treatment” while at Walt Disney World. For the mere price of $225, one parent and one child (usually a mother and daughter pair) can have a tea party with Sleeping Beauty’s Princess Aurora in Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort. The child attending will also receive “a special 18″ My Disney Girl doll dressed in a matching Princess Aurora gown plus accessories” as well as “take home [her] own ribbon tiara, silver Princess link bracelet, fresh rose, special princess scrapbook set and a “Best Friend” certificate.” If more than just one adult and one child would like to attend this experience, each additional adult is $75 and each additional child is $150.

I definitely don’t mention these services in order to advertise for them, but I also don’t mean to degrade them either. I seek here just to point out the extreme extravagance of it all, and to highlight just how crazy families can get when helping to fulfill their daughters’ (Disney-inspired) Princess dreams.

This is also exactly why Disney keeps highlighting the “Dream” and “wishing” aspect of all of the Princess, as well as the Pirate and Princess, marketing. If they keep creating the “Princess dream” through their products and advertising they can also keep finding ways for people to fulfill that dream…and they are able to make a hefty profit doing so. These Princess experiences are just plain expensive, and it’s mostly middle-class families on vacation who shell out hundreds and hundreds of dollars to get their three-year-old a costume, a hairstyle, and some shimmering makeup.

With all of this hard-earned money spent on Princess-style pampering, it’s obvious that the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique and services like it are not just fulfilling the Princess dreams of the young child, but are also fulfilling some fantasy for the parents who pay for it. Parents not only greatly appreciate the “royal treatment” their daughters receive, but are also willing to go to great lengths to document these special and expensive experiences, taking hundreds of photographs, videotaping the whole thing, and even editing their photos together with Disney music and posting it on Youtube, thus sharing the extravagance of the situation with anyone who is willing to watch.

In addition to being there as a medium for recording the memories of it, though, some parents, and especially mothers, will also join in on the Princess experience themselves. Adults can go to the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique just like little girls, and it is not uncommon for a mother to get a Princess makeover along with her daughter (see “Walt Disney Princess Makeover” video below). This common experience for mother and daughter makes the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique and My Disney Girl’s Perfectly Princess Tea Party much more than simply dressing up like or meeting a Disney Princess. It is transformed into a mother-daughter (or caregiver-daughter) bonding experience the instant it becomes more about the relationship and commonality of the experience than about the actual products and services being provided. It is this bonding experience, where parents get to experience something extra special with their little girls, then, that Disney is selling to parents in these services, and it is an important reason why Disney can charge the prices that they do.

Whereas the little girl might think it is actually the dress, the tiara, and the pink sash that are important in going to the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique, parents who are paying for the makeover and photo shoot are actually paying to see their daughter transformed into a fantasy Princess right in front of their eyes. Parents are able to see their daughter grow up, complete with makeup, nails, and a pseudo-wedding dress, but they are still indulged in seeing her as totally innocent at the same time.

Whereas when their daughter actually grows up parents may, and probably will, miss out on many of her important and life-changing experiences, the Bibbidi Bobbidi allows parents to see the whole thing in less than two hours and not miss an instant. This also gives a motivation for parents’ apparent fascination with making sure they record this entire experience. After all, why pay so much to watch your daughter in her Princess moment if you can’t keep a record of it for years to come? (In addition to the videos below, also notice the ‘Dad’ in the background of the second Princess Tea Party photo who’s videotaping the whole thing.)

“Viola’s Princessification Part 1″

“Viola’s Princessification Part 2″

“Viola’s Princessification Part 3″

When moms choose to be made over with their young daughters, they are also proving that they are young at heart and innocent just like their daughters. They are not only keeping their little girl innocent by making her into an imaginary Princess, but they are also there to show that they are able to believe, or at least pay to pretend to believe, that they can be a Princess too.

Whatever the motive for parents to either record their daughter’s makeover and/or participate in it themselves, Disney has created a paradigm where a full family vacation is no longer complete without some sort of Princess experience for mom and daughter. They are able to charge exorbitant amounts for families to achieve these fantasies because they are marketed and presented as just that – fantasies, which can only be lived out in a Disney fantasy world.

The Disney Princess concept is not only intimately connected with the creation of the perceptions these little girls have about gender norms, stereotypes, and expectations, then (as many of the other discourses on the subject have proposed), but services such as the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique and My Disney Girl’s Perfectly Princess Tea Party are also evidence of how consumerism has shaped these little girls’ childhoods. Not only does the Bibbidi Bobbidi create the ideal of a “True Princess” who wants to “twirl” in “glass slippers” rather than “walk” in plain “sneakers,” but the Disney Princess paradigm inspires her to aim for the crystal slipper instead of the glass one and the updo haistyle with a tiara instead of the simple cut-and-wash, and to just ignore the price tag as she swipes her credit card and walks away.

It’s the first segment that I’ve found from any television news source that covers the effects of, what this segment calls, “The Princess Effect.” What I find most interesting about it is that it seems like it’s a response to Peggy Orenstein’s New York Times article What’s Wrong With Cinderella (they even show a piece of a very short interview with her) and yet they come to a total opposite conclusion of what Orenstein says about the magnitude and effect of the Princess franchise on girls’ products and perceptions.

In fact, their take-away message is that “making too big a deal about any game your child is playing could be harmful”– in effect saying that “The Princess Effect” is no effect at all if parents don’t make a “big deal” out of it. Then again, the last line of the piece seem the most telling – “We should mention that Disney is a parent company of ABC.”

This segment, although at least addressing the issue, actually ends up skirting what their own sources and even images are telling the audience throughout. We see hot chocolate, dog bowls, costumes, pull-ups, and even toothpaste plastered with the faces of the Disney Princesses, and yet the segment concludes by simultaneously telling parents that they shouldn’t blow the issue out of proportion but that talking to their children about it will be “good practice” for more challenging problems that will arise in adolescence. Denial, reassurance, and fear all at the same time. Nice.

Disney has learned that they can market not just their programs but also their actors and actresses, and has been known for jump-starting the careers of stars like Lindsay Lohan (remember Disney’s 1998 version of Parent Trap?) and Hilary Duff. But just because Disney has succeeded in becoming a tween-’Mecca’ of entertainment does not mean that they are not still trying to inject some “Disney Princess” into their tween-market.

The following videos illustrate Disney’s motivation to do so, combining classic “Disney Princess” scenes, characters, and movies with the “Disney Channel Circle of Stars” and a modern and pop sound to try and entice tweens to hearken back to their girl-hood yearning for that glass slipper.

I may be too sensitive here to the term “girl” because of all the discussions we’ve had this semester about “Girl Power” and its multiple meanings, but it seems a bit odd to me when, in the article, Critchell quotes Kirstie Kelly (the designer of the Disney Collection) as saying “We wanted women to feel like they had something in common with these princesses. We had to identify who the princesses are now and who does the everyday girl relate to.” Why would Kelly first refer to the brides buying these dresses as “women,” and then in her very next sentence call them “girls”? Kelly may not mean anything different in using the two terms, she may not have even realized she’d changed her language, but the issue here seems somehow more important and compounded by the fact that she’s talking about designing wedding gowns inspired by fictional characters from children’s movies.

Although it seems paradoxical that Disney would be able to sell what is essentially a traditional girlhood fantasy to a grown-up, successful, and modern woman, it is exactly that phenomenon that they are cashing in on. “Disney’s Mooney points out that a woman’s first impression of love often comes from an animated character and it’s hard to completely erase that from her mind. “If you think about who the first person who teaches you about love, romance and Prince Charming is, it probably happened between the ages of 2-5 and included Disney.” In addition to using those early childhood experiences, though, Disney also wins here because of their brand loyalty. “Adult women buy into a sort of lifestyle role play…As a brand, Disney has a built-in reputation for quality and trust, Mooney added, so it doesn’t start from scratch when it enters categories such as cruise travel, better furniture or wedding gowns.”

“Andy Mooney, chairman of Disney Consumer Products Worldwide, said that when the company began developing the marketing concept of the princesses six or seven years ago, the company discovered that the demographic wasn’t limited to the 2- to 8-year-olds Disney was expecting. “We’ve been blown away how strong the demand is for princess thematic things in almost every stage of a woman’s life,” he said.” Add to this the aforementioned ideas about imprinting and brand loyalty, and Disney has a smash-hit in their Fairy Tale Weddings Collection.

To see the newly-released wedding gowns themselves, go to http://www.disneybridal.com/index.html and choose from Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Disney’s Jasmine, Ariel, and Belle’s Collections. Also, notice the pseudo ‘mission statement’ on the Home page, which seems to summarize the inherent gender norms of the Disney Princesses quite well.

“The Gown, The Slipper, The Kiss and The Prince. Under it all, every girl believes in the dream. So here is our tribute to fairy tale wishes and finding true love. “

But when you juxtapose the nature of the progression of the two videos (Whitney’s original music video for “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” and the Princess version, that is), the take-home message you get from the videos are complete opposites of each other. In the Princess version, the video progresses from images of the Princesses being sad, lonely, and struggling on their own to, ultimately, images of the Princesses dancing with or kissing their Princes in their “Happily Ever After” moment. In the Whitney video, though, Whitney begins by being totally independent, singing at a concert to hundreds of excited fans, moves to embarrassing and laughing at men as she finds them unworthy (notice when she dumps water on one guy, flips the gender stereotypes and dips the man she dances with in another scene, and physically shakes and throws down a third man), and the video ultimately ends not with her finding true love but with a portrait of her looking happy and content, and all on her own once again. It seems that the Whitney video (1987) sends a message all about girl power, but the Princess video takes the same music and lyrics and makes it all about finding a man to save you.

Original music video by Whitney Houston

Princess version (complete with non-Disney Princesses such as Thumbelina and Anastasia as well)

In my personal experience, I’m pretty sure the kids I babysit for care much more about what’s playing on their TV or DVD player than what it looks like in and of itself, but Disney has found yet another outlet on which to project its “Pirate and Princess” marketing strategy. The issues discussed at length in my “…Of Pirates” post remain the same in the following descriptions of Disney’s new products, and the way in which they blatantly appeal to gender norms is, yet again, intriguing to the way in which Disney markets its girls’ and boys’ merchandise.

(from Disney’s advertising for these products)

“Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean Electronics
Modern-day Pirates will treasure Disney’s new line of Pirates of the Caribbean electronics. The new line has something for everyone – from skulls-and-crossbones-topped TVs to a DVD player resembling a captain’s wheel on a Pirate’s ship, from a boom box shaped like Davy Jones’ chest to a skull clock radio featuring Disney Pirates music.

Disney Princess Electronics
Little girls can add a bit of royalty to their rooms with the new redesigned line of Disney Princess electronics. They can choose from tiara-topped, pink and gold Disney Princess TVs and TV/DVD combos with dazzling, wand-shaped full function remote control, a Disney Princess boom box which plays CDs and doubles as a stunning jewelry box, a pink, heart-shaped Disney Princess personal CD player designed as a purse with carrying strap, and an alarm clock radio shaped like Sleeping Beauty’s magical castle which plays custom Princess songs.”

As part of a growing trend in India to engage Indian youth in order to expand a brand name’s recognition and popularity, Disney launched its “My Little Princess Hunt” in India back in 2005. This “hunt” was comprised of a contest where little girls could submit a drawing of their favorite imaginary Princess, and Disney offered a trip to Hong Kong for the grand prize winner and the chance to appear on the Disney Channel in India for five semi-finalists.

In addition, “Disney’s Little Princess” contest was held in India in late 2006 as “an elaborate, across-the-line event around Disney Princess franchise. Little girls across India can participate in this event by purchasing any Disney Princess product worth Rs 100 or more and win an entry to audition for the ‘Disney’s Little Princess’ contest.”

The “Disney Princess is also popular in the television space with the branded block – ‘Disney Princess hour’. Viewers can also experience the magical world of Disney Princesses through Disney Movie Magic every weekend in select Adlabs locations in cities across India through classic titles like ‘Snow White’, ‘Beauty & the Beast’, ‘Aladdin’, etc.”

My point is that, in the last few years, not only has the Disney Princess brand gained momentum in the girls’ merchandise market in the US, but also that it is fast on its way to taking over in India where, “in total, girls have access to two billion hours of immersion into the Disney Princess experience.”

India’s “My Little Princess Hunt” may be over, but the Princess Paradigm has officially gone global.